Reg Research
The results of our mega-survey on consumerisation are in. It was a big sucker, and all those who completed it should be congratulated for their stamina and commitment. And your efforts really are appreciated, because we learned a lot.
In the first part of the survey, we asked readers to tell us about their own use of personal …

Survey
We’re hearing lots of stories about the ‘consumerisation’ of IT – in other words giving users freedom to choose the equipment and online services they need to do their jobs well – and this is the topic of our latest Reg Reader survey.
We have already had a ton of responses from IT professionals - hardly surprising, given Reg …

Workshop
The Apple Mac is an appropriate candidate for the ‘I want one of those because he’s got one’ poster child. However, the creep of consumerism and its impact on the range of computing devices which find themselves inside organisations goes beyond mere executive envy.
The consumerisation phenomenon is a little tricky to pin down, …

The financials for a bunch of Microsoft’s top table enterprise licensing channel partners are in, and though none of them are getting rich quickly, there’s seems room enough in straight reselling to make a living.
York-based Software Box (SBL) toasted its 25 years of life by bringing home £128.1m in sales for the 12 months ended …

An arbitration court has sided with the Unite union and ordered Fujitsu Services to go open kimono about employee's pay structure, in a bid to aid collective bargaining during the annual pay review.
The Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) — an independent dispute resolution body with statuary powers — received a complaint from …

Live Chat
In most discussions of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and consumerisation the experts' mistrust of users is evident. Typically, IT departments are not keen on people bringing their own devices into work with the expectation that apps, services and support will just magically work.
But some organisations have decided to trust the …

Throwing costs overboard, smaller interest repayments and walking away from lower-margin business beautified Ingram Micro UK’s bottom line in calendar ’13, as its latest Companies House filing reveals.
The Milton Keynes-based biz reported turnover of £968.5m, up 2.15 per cent, or 1.4 per cent when inter-group trade (£36.7m) was …

Storage startup Qumulo, founded by ex-Isilon execs, wants to get rid of the digital dumpsters it says are littering the file storage landscape by building a scale-out filesystem suitable for the flash age.
It believes future storage will be software, using low-cost commodity hardware, functioning as an intelligent collaborator …

Storagebod
“Yet another change to a licensing model. You can bet it’s not going to work out any cheaper for me," was the first thought that flickered through my mind during a presentation about GPFS 4.1 at the GPFS UG meeting in London.
This started up another train of thought: in this new world of software-defined storage, how should the …

IT contractors are being treated to whopping great annual pay rises of up to 13 per cent, a survey has revealed.
While the rest of the world makes do with rock bottom wages, tech bods working in the financial services sector are finding their pay packets shoot skywards due to heavy demand for their skills, according to the …

Storagebod
I’ve been fairly used to the idea that my PC at home is substantially better than my work one; this has certainly been the case for me for more than a decade. I’m a geek and I spend more than most on my personal technology environment.
However, it is no longer just my home PC. I’ve got better software tools and back-end systems …

Corporations are close to handing staff credit notes to buy or choose their own technology in a trend that will bust classic IT departments and supply chains, HP's top boss for Europe reckons.
BYOD has morphed into Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) but the impact will still be just as dramatic, said Herbert Kock, HP's joint head of …

Kelway's former chief bean counter Craig Compton has bagged a seat on the board and keys to the COO's office at south coast-based reseller Vohkus.
Compton left Kelway in the summer of 2011 after three and a half year stint during which the company hoovered up targets including Panacea, Repton and ISC Networks.
The abacus …

SAM specialist and global Microsoft licensing solutions partner (LSP) Crayon is looking to cosy up to a small bunch of resellers and SIs via a sales referral model.
The Nordic-owned consultancy and licensing transactional engine set up shop in Blighty after devouring locally based Fast Ltd a year ago.
The 45-strong UK operation …

Bring Your Own Device programmes can help to keep staff happy and turn IT bods into "heroes" but the hard RoI from spikes in productivity is unproven, according to Intel’s IT manager for China.
Liam Keating told media at Chipzilla’s Cloud Summit event in Bangkok this week that Intel has around 29,000 employee handsets to manage …

XMA staged a top line recovery in calendar 2012 as it reduced its reliance on the public sector by drumming up more business with commercial customers.
The Nottingham-based reseller upped revenues by 5.1 per cent in the year - to £122m from £116m in 2011 - but this was still short of the £140m turnover it racked up back in 2010 …

DropBox is tightening up its service for businesses rather than risk getting kicked out by security-conscious CIOs.
The collaboration service, hyped by Silicon Valley, will start offering secure and remotely managed connections between people's personal and business DropBox accounts on PC and mobile from next month.
Its DropBox …

Many companies understand the obvious aspects of BYOD (bring your own device) and mobile device management (MDM). Employees work on the devices that they like and use and share data seamlessly, whether that data is personal or business.
Mobile devices nowadays can do so much more than texting and sending emails. They can provide …

With a new wave of low-cost tablets hitting the shelves of retailers globally last Christmas – some starting at as little as £100 – consumers of all ages and professions rushed out to grab their very own before the "sold out" sign appeared.
But as tablet prices decrease, the potential business impact of the consumerisation of IT …

Slogging it out in the licensing sales game is a tough business. Scale is a requisite to compensate for thinning margins, and vendors are constantly chopping away at back-end fees.
Microsoft large account reseller (LAR) Comparex typifies the challenge facing software resellers, and the net margin strain can be seen in their …

Analysis
Nokia Lumia 630 Windows Phone
We attended a Microsoft conference in London earlier this month, along with 200 senior execs, to find out more about Windows Phone 8.1, the company’s big play to get customers to buy into its enterprise mobility story.
At the same time we were treated to the UK debut of the Nokia Lumia 630, the …

For IT architects, one of the most important non-functional requirements to determine is the availability needs of a system’s users.
It’s often expensive and risky adding availability features to an already deployed solution, so getting it right first time is important. In current times however, we’re being asked to regularly …

Promo
Youtube Video
On June 4 Microsoft UK held its Business Transformed summit in London to share the love for Windows Phone and Windows 8.1.
We have already covered some of the speakers in two previous articles (here and here). In this outing we zoom in on the customer panel discussion that rounded off the conference.
The Register …

Our Regcast of 13 June, BYOD Beyond the Noise, focused on the infrastructure you build to accommodate the consumerisation of IT.
Trevor Kelly and Andy Cooper, our studio guests from HP, pointed out that universities are one group of institutions that know how to do BYOD (bring your own device) well.
In the past 10 years further …

Businesses risk flunking software licence audits and overpaying for their apps by rolling out their own take on Apple’s iTunes app stores for business.
That’s the warning from an IDC and Flexera Software poll that found 63 per cent of companies are planning their own enterprise app stores.
Stores will be used by staff to …

Capita's top bosses' annual compensation packages rose by a fifth last year - at the same time the UK outsourcing giant's IT Services (ITS) workers had their wages frozen and bonuses scrapped.
Hard-pressed ITS staffers, who are thrashing out a pay deal for 2013, were furious when they learned of the windfall enjoyed by execs at …

Most vendors and analysts agree: you can’t avoid BYOD (bring your own device). But despite all the excitement about letting people use whatever smartphones, tablets, convertibles or latest thingamajig they want at work, many businesses are still wary of the BYOD trend.
Some organisations, by necessity, just cannot adopt BYOD …

Fusion-io flogs software to turn a server fitted with its PCIe flash cards into a shared storage appliance. It turns out that the software is based on UK developer ID7's code and Fusion-io has just bought the company.
ID7 was set up in 2006 and produces SCST, an open-source Linux component used by many storage vendors. It is a …

Some Microsoft customers running the latest version of BizTalk Server can expect a massive hike in their bill under a licensing change being ushered in on 1 April.
Redmond is scrapping its per-processor license for BizTalk Server 2013 and will instead begin charging users according to the number of cores running on their …

Nothing elicits passionate debate quite like the suggestion that consumer technology is dictating workplace IT - with the exception of arguments over the Windows 8 Metro desktop, perhaps.
The debate on the consumerisation of IT is packed with business, legal and human resources headaches. Individual prejudices and experience …

One of the latest buzzwords to contaminate this great language of ours is ‘consumerisation’. According to many marketeers, it defines the future of end user computing.
As with all good marketing terms, various definitions exist because ambiguity leaves more room for creative product positioning. Fundamentally, however, employees …

Sysadmin blog
So you want to know about security? Well you have come to the right place. I have been here for a while and I can tell you that outside these gates it’s full of cowboys, sharks and pirates, none of whom will hesitate to take what is yours and call it their own.
The above is is a quote from a brochure I wrote in an attempt to …

Shiny new mobile gizmos are driving the consumerisation of IT. As a systems administrator, I am naturally wary.
Sure, it makes end-users happier, but they aren’t the ones who end up in front of the firing squad when security gets breached.
Users don’t care about security. They never have and they never will; it is an …

The storage landscape is changing. The storage products and skills needed for a small firm have so far been very different from those needed in large enterprises. Yet we now have some storage vendors delivering enterprise-class products aimed at workgroups, while some enterprise buyers choose mid-range products to save money. …

Exclusive
HP will not offer a BYOD programme internally, presumably because it can't take the ignominy of employees potentially turning up with shiny Apple kit: or devices from any other vendor for that matter.
The US tech monster, which continues to stagger, has a raft of "BYOD solutions", including security and storage solutions, but …

Companies are paying £61 a month for every device their workers bring into the office, but less than half of IT departments have any say in mobile strategy these days.
The numbers come from biz Wi-Fi flogger iPass, which discovered that only 48 per cent of IT departments are still in control of the spending on mobile devices, …

Symantec has bought privately held mobile application management firm Nukona. Terms of the deal, announced Tuesday, were undisclosed.
The purchase, along with the earlier acquisition of mobile device management firm Odyssey Software, will allow Symantec to develop and market products that support the growing trend of allowing …

Over a quarter of Capita's IT Services division were given pay rises in the April review this year, the firm has said, but the rest of them will have to wait until business is better.
ITS managing director Peter Hands and ops director Steve Rick said in a conference call on Friday that the pay rises they had managed to squeeze …

Comment
What exactly is end-user computing (EUC)? There are so many different definitions that even vendors can’t agree on a single version of the truth. These range from VDI technology to file sharing across multiple devices to platforms that let you access cloud-based apps.
What is clear is that just like cloud computing, …

HP will make another run at the fondleslab market.
During a conference call regarding HP's astonishing decision to keep its PC biz after all, the company said it will bring out a Windows 8 tablet and is evaluating what to do with webOS, the TouchPad tablet operating system.
Although ex-HP CEO Leo Apotheker killed off the …

Despite a run of high-profile security breaches, almost half of UK corporate laptops remain unprotected against theft and data loss, according to a survey of British businesses published on Thursday.
Only 52 per cent of 320 UK public and private sector IT managers polled in the survey use data encryption on their corporate …

Microsoft is claiming something of a PR win over arch rival Apple, after a senior exec reportedly revealed that its Windows Phone devices are outselling the iPhone in China after just two months.
Redmond’s COO for Greater China, Michel van der Bel, told Dutch business title Emerce that the platform has a market share of seven …

Steve Ballmer is eyeing up an Apple-style future for Microsoft of device manufacture and support, just as he’s been personally dinged for underperforming in one of the company’s cash cows: Windows.
Microsoft’s chief executive has evangelised devices as the future opportunity for Redmond in his annual letter to shareholders, …

Within the next year, almost half of the cloud deals negotiated by value-added resellers will not have an IT team representative present when the technology decision is made, according to the latest predictions from top IT biz analysts Gartner and Forrester.
The consumerisation of IT - where biz bods introduce cutting edge tech …

Podcast
speaking_in_tech Greg Knieriemen podcast enterprise
Enterprise tech guru Greg Knieriemen, and master of all that is cloud and storage Ed Saipetch, are back with another episode of enterprise and consumer tech-cast Speaking in Tech. This week, web2.0 and social media analyst Sarah Vela mysteriously goes AWOL ... after just …

Well, it’s that time of the year again: time to engage in some belated amateur crystal ball gazing to pick out the channel trends of the next 12 months. In all honesty, I think 2012 went better than any of us could have hoped, given the continued macro-economic slump throughout Europe.
Considering the less-than-glorious forecast …

Live Broadcast
Social networks, local admins, unpatched software, missing USBs: the causes of security problems in your business are often not just the big stuff that tries to get inside the firewall, it's the little problems that are already on the inside.
On October 13th at 16:00 BST/11:00 EDT, our latest live Regcast questions-
Could your …

Asian IT professionals are racing ahead of their global rivals when it comes to implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in their organisations, according to new research from BT.
The telecoms giant interviewed 2,000 IT users and managers in 11 countries and found that those in the region were the most forward thinking …

The tech sector fared well in Q4 largely due to channel bullyboy Apple's unstoppable sales juggernaut - but IT distributors are missing out on this boom.
According to the Tech Titan Index by beancounter Canalys, the combined sales growth of Cisco, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Lexmark, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Apple was …